Dear Nathan,
I will refrain from commenting on the bulk of your email. But I would like
to ask you to reflect on the paragraph referring to the precautionary
aspect.
The narrative of Carl Sagan helping to end the Cold War undersells the
complex sway of history -- the intersecting circumstances, actions and
events -- that facilitated a change in course. The contrasting narratives
of "impending catastrophe" or "infinite resilience" reflect a similar need
to simplify. They capture neither human ingenuity nor its biophysical
limits.
Regarding your take on the possible "cooking of the books" by Sagan, one
could just as well speculate that it dented the credibility of the
scientific community for decades to come. That it has made encouraging
action difficult despite apparently incontrovertible evidence. Knowledge
endows scientists with a unique privilege (and I dare say power) -- but it
still does not confer divinity on them.
Sincerely,
Ninad
_______________________________________________________________
Ninad R. Bondre, Ph.D. | Science Editor
International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP)
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Box 50005, SE 104-05 Stockholm,
Sweden
www.igbp.net
On Thursday, September 20, 2012 10:41:00 PM UTC+2, Nathan Currier wrote:
>
> Dear Jim,
>
> I hope that you received my email of last spring, suggesting, among other
> things, that you might consider
> at least waiting until this summer's sea-ice melt season was over, in
> terms of your changed positions
> mentioned in the press, your upcoming book, etc. Yesterday we arrived at
> that minimum, and so I'm writing
> again. But this time I'm making it a sort of open letter - also sending
> it to all those who follow the geoengineering
> group of Ken Caldeira and Mike MacCracken, as well as to AMEG, the group
> I've been in lately that sea-ice
> expert Peter Wadhams also belongs to, and a few others, including Jim
> Hansen - as I wish to stimulate general
> conversation in this way, and possibly others will want to weigh in, too.
> After all, you were one of geoengineering's
> most vocal public advocates, but have recently said that you've changed
> your mind about the climate crisis altogether,
> which has struck many as odd. I'm hoping that this summer's sea-ice might
> have given you pause.
>
> I was actually attending a meeting yesterday here in NYC, convened
> by Greenpeace, with Jim Hansen and
> others from the climate world, addressing the "Polar Emergency." I'm sure
> you've taken note of everything
> that has been going on, in any case, and I've wondered how you feel about
> what has happened since the spring.
> A great curiosity for me is that, when you were quoted in the press
> talking about your new change of position
> and book, you mentioned how, "We were supposed to be halfway toward a
> frying world," according to your
> previous views. I just did my own bit of accounting of what you predicted,
> specifically, in those works, and
> wish to go over some of it now.
>
> *The Revenge of Gaia * and *The Vanishing face of Gaia* were published
> six and three years ago, respectively,
> and both concern the 21st century and beyond, so they clearly cannot be
> judged yet in their full implications,
> nor will any of us alive today ever be able to do so. Hopefully they will
> be wrong, because of human action.
> But in fact, when *The* *Revenge of Gaia* or *The Vanishing **Face of
> Gaia projections *are compared in detail against
> what has happened since, it is unquestionable that things are either
> perfectly on track or progressing *more quickly*
> than you had projected then.
>
> Of course, there was a somewhat poetic use of language at times in both of
> them, covering things that no one ever
> expects to see - a "few last breeding pairs" or some such phrase, for
> example, but this kind of "setting the scene" is not
> science, and so largely irrelevant, and I didn't find a single thing,
> looking at them last night, to provide evidence yet that
> the reverse is true, and show any *specific projection* that has failed
> to come true or is behind schedule in either book.
> Let's go over it.
>
> Most of your specific predictions concerned a projected state shift in the
> climate system when CO2 reaches around 500ppm,
> based on your own modeling, some of others', PETM paleoclimate data, etc.
> In *Revenge* you noted that at current rates 500ppm
> would be achieved "in forty years." It's not explicit in *Revenge*, but
> in *Vanishing Face* you made it clear that you meant multi-gas
> CO2e, so actually at current rates we will get to 500ppm CO2e well before
> 2046, even without any big feedbacks kicking in, etc.
> For example, while there's some question on accounting in multigas
> calculations (what GWPs get used, for example), typically it's
> considered we're at 430 or 440ppm of CO2e now. Even were there no methane,
> CFCs, etc, emitted at all, we'd get there by ~2032 at
> current CO2 emissions rates, I think. In *Vanishing Face*, p86, you spoke
> of how "in a few decades" the world would not be
> the same home for its seven billion humans ("apart from a lucky accident
> or geoengineering"), and even wrote a little later in that
> book (p89) that "for the present" you were assuming the planet would warm
> "at least as severely as the mid-range of IPCC predicts",
> and followed that by saying that "Nothing is certain; and I have to allow
> that none of this may happen," spoke about decadal variability
> and then went on to say that there could possibly even be a big volcanic
> eruption, or we might actually geoengineer successfully, etc. So,
> with all of these broad generalities, they are either surprisingly mild,
> descriptive of the course we're on, or actually being exceeded.
>
> And now, we have just come to something far more specific: the ice-albedo
> feedback is what Hansen likes to call a "fast feedback",
> and so for the first time we begin to get a glimpse of something we can
> judge, even in the small time frame of the years since your
> two books appeared. The 2012 summer sea ice minimum is past, and it is
> clear - thus far, *Revenge of Gaia* vastly *under-projected*
> how quickly things might evolve with it. For example, you have on page 54
> a comparison of summer sea-ice minima from 1983, 2003,
> and the imagined mid-21st century (in the text you say 2030-2050). After
> the huge crash of 2007, Tim Lenton and some others essentially
> said that this was likely a jump to a new stable state, suggesting that it
> might hang around that new level for some time. But now
> we know for sure that even that is not true, and it seems quite clear that
> it is really part of a death spiral in the summer ice,
> which is on a trajectory far, far faster than your graph suggested, and as
> you know, at current rates will reach a near-zero
> state in the next 4-8 years (if not before).
>
> You frequently used the PETM as a model for future climate in both books,
> which has become quite standard in conventional climatology
> for the warming we could add this century. You also got the extremes in
> weather right - in *The Revenge*, on p60, you wrote how the
> IPCC TAR shows the gradual rise of warming, but not the unpredicted
> extremes, floods, and more severe storms. "We should expect
> climate changes of a kind never even thought of, one-off events affecting
> no more than a region." You went on to use the 2003 heat
> wave in Europe as an example. Just recently, many scientists have finally
> said the same thing, calling the 2003 heatwave the first
> clearly global warming-engendered disaster, and Hansen has said that,
> although he projected extreme weather increases long ago,
> even he underestimated how quickly it could increase, and yet there's no
> sense in either of your books that it might be playing a role
> in hundreds of billions of dollars' damages per year within *a few years'*
> time.
> You mentioned drought as the greatest enemy
> (*Vanishing Face*, p84), but certainly not that the U.S. might be
> experiencing its worst drought in instrumental records only three years
> after publication! Nor, in the related discussion of food security, that
> the UN would be posting a food security alert in a few years.
> So, again - you had it exactly right - in a sense, as a full picture, and
> despite issues of "poetic license," you could claim to have
> generally depicted coming effects as well as anyone else - but, as far as
> can be strictly judged
> thus far, when specific dates are available, you have thus far *
> under-projected* changes, not over-projected them.
>
> On page 34 of *The Revenge*, you listed a half dozen feedbacks that would
> upend climate predictions.
> These different feedbacks inspired the book, as your account of your
> Hadley Center trip with Sandy shows.
> The first and the last of these, though - albedo and methane feedbacks -
> aren't presented as being connected
> at all in the list, while in fact, the methane feedbacks are deeply
> intertwined with the sea-ice, and that's a key
> point here: now that we know the sea-ice is almost certainly going to be
> gone quite soon in summer, with possibly
> as much change in the coming few years' summer extent losses as over the
> last few decades, methane
> increases are likely to follow for real, and there are already clear signs
> that adumbrate that shift, as I'm sure
> you're aware - the hundred of thousands of land-based sources that have
> been recorded, the big plumes around
> the ESAS marine sources, the sonar readings there, the atmospheric
> readings breaking 7,000ppb
> taken in one expedition along the coast, the mysterious methane anomaly
> over the whole arctic ocean, etc., etc.
>
> A final thing, and that is the precautionary aspect: perhaps Carl Sagan
> cooked the books a bit on nuclear
> winter modeling, as Lynn herself felt and others said afterwards, by
> over-emphasizing the modeling that seemed to
> show the larger nuclear winter effects. We are all the happier for it
> today. Imagine if he had picked the other model,
> and we had continued build-ups of ICBMs and 'Star Wars' and so on instead,
> one can only imagine all the dangers
> we'd be in today, to add to the other climate ones I'm discussing now.
> Instead, Sagan helped to close down the Cold War.
>
> The world really needs you back as a leader on climate action, Jim, in
> part because it seems more and more that we are
> really going to need geoengineering for the arctic very soon, in addition
> to really aggressive non-CO2 reductions (and obviously,
> this is *in addition to* decarbonizing the whole economy), I feel sure,
> and there are very few people who have the capacity of
> public persuasion that you do. You could be a great help to the world
> again right now, given the rapid evolution of things,
> so I hope that you'll seriously consider what I'm saying.
>
> I've also attached a recent Jim Hansen paper on energy imbalances, in case
> you hadn't seen it, which I think is close to your recent
> concerns on the seeming lack of rise of warming in recent global surface
> temperatures, where the energy is going,
> total energy budget, etc.
>
> All best,
>
> Nathan
>
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